Archive for October, 2009

Hi. I am learning how to use this site. Here are some rather gambling idioms/metaphors used for baseball happenings.

NY Times: Monday, February 11, 2008

“A’s roll the dice with Sweeney” “Mike Sweeney said he jumped the gun a little Sunday when the five-time All-Star told the Kansas City media that he’d signed a minor-league deal with Oakland. There was one little problem—no one had told the A’s.”

NY Times, February 7, 2008

“Before the Ante, the Mets have a pair of Aces”: an article about John Santana and Willie Randolph, ace pitchers for the New York Mets baseball team. (Aces are the highest cards in a deck of cards.

From “On Language”, NY Times, Jack Rosenthal 9/27/2009, pinch hitting for William Safire, who was sick at the time and recently deceased: “When the baseball season began in April, William Safire reviewed baseball terms that have become part of the language, like ballpark figures, meaning rough estimates, or a political candidate ’s hoping to knock the ball out of the park. Now the imminent end of the regular season occasions further reflection.

Some terms, literally within the ballpark, have been around so long that their sources are shrouded in legend. My favorite is out of left field, which has come to describe an idea that sounds irrelevant, even crazy. Paul Dickson’s Baseball Dictionary cites several explanations, notably that when the Chicago Cubs moved to Wrigley Field, the site of their old park was developed he the University of Illinois, which built a mental hospital in -where else?– left field.”

I started this blog for news articles which contain sports/games idioms. I had started an educational site www.sportsidioms.com to explain American sports idioms/metaphors, then added this to show how the idioms are used in the news.